Of Masters and Saviors in Troubled Countries 

By Drew Wayland

The knife comes down toward Desiré with lethal intent. Twenty centimeters from tip to handle, the broad blade catches a beam of sunlight as it arcs toward the crook of his neck. A strike aimed there—at the jugular vein or carotid artery—rarely fails to kill. But in the fraction of second between the attacker's raised arm and what should have been violent, bloody contact, Desiré's right forearm sweeps across his body, striking his attacker hard at the wrist. The knife goes flying, landing halfway across the gym and bouncing erratically on the rubberized floor. A young man nearby, between kettlebell sets, simply removes one earbud, glances at the knife, and shrugs.

Desiré's attacker, meanwhile, beams with pride. "Yes sir!" he shouts. "This is the way it is done." He bows, low and slow. “Oss!” he shouts. A traditional acknowledgement of respect and readiness used often in karate and jiu jitsu.

“Oss!” Desiré responds, bowing in turn.

In Master Lolo's dojo, the stakes are real—or at least as real as he can simulate. His allotted corner of the already undersized Harrington Street MyGym seems, to the outside observer, wanting for space. As dojos go, it may be among the humblest. Along the east wall by the windows, under a dazzling view of Devil’s Peak, stands a regulation-sized sparring ring: a black mat fenced in by three nylon ropes of pink, white, and blue. A row of punching bags flanks the back wall, while a limited set of strength machines and weight racks crowd the space near the door. But for Master Lolo, this modest corner is his ryu—reminiscent of those glorious dojos in the kung fu films of his youth. A space, it seems to him, worthy of his status as a black belt and a Shotokan karate master.

Standing there, watching the men spar, I feel caught between worlds: one foot in the stale, sweaty realm of clanking machines and banal exercise, the other in a dignified temple of martial arts. I'm reminded of early churches that repurposed caves and stables for worship under cover of darkness. But it's not the building that makes a dojo—it's the people. A master and his students, in this case.

"When you are out in the street and someone is coming at you with a knife," Master Lolo explains, making a stabbing motion with his closed fist, "you will panic. That is why I practice with a real knife. If we train with a wooden knife, you’ll freeze up when you see the real thing."

Having been proudly disarmed by Desiré, his longest-tenured student and friend from long ago days in a foreign land, Master Lolo ducks under the ropes to retrieve the knife. With his back still turned, he calls out, "Did you bring your nunchaku?"

"Yes, Master."

"Good. Go. Get them.”

***

It's Lolo's nunchaku (more often referred to as nun chucks) that have earned him a measure of local fame. Along Harrington Street—a bustling social avenue on the eastern edge of Cape Town's urban core—kitchen staff, office workers, bar flies, and digital nomads all recognize him by the black wooden nun chucks he carries like an extra appendage. Five nights a week Lolo patrols the half-kilometer stretch, managing street-level security for Harrington's businesses and their patrons.

His domain carries the weight of unlikely revitalization and a history of contested names. Real estate developers have taken to calling it East City. Apartheid urban planners once rebranded parts of the area as Zonnebloem. But for generations, Harrington Street formed the western boundary of the old District Six, still the name heard most often today.

District Six was once a symbol of resistance to segregation, a vibrant but tense mixing ground for Cape Town's many cultural heritages deep into the apartheid era. It was a place of brilliant diversity and defiant creativity. There's something fitting in the fact that this corner of the city, now caught between gentrification and its radical past, is patrolled by a Congolese immigrant whose nun chucks represent their own form of cultural fusion.

Those who inquire about Lolo, usually young revelers stumbling out of the neighborhood’s dive bars and dance halls, are treated to impromptu displays of his nun chuck prowess, the wooden sticks blurring through elaborate tricks and spins. Infrequent visitors have affectionately dubbed him the ‘nun chuck car guard.’

This is the moniker I first hear in reference to the sturdy forty-seven-year-old master, a multi-disciplinary black belt of more martial arts than he can list. Before we meet, I know him only as that character, a one-note act putting on a show for extra tips. Cape Town, of course, is a city teeming with characters, a coastal reef that collects and feeds the eccentric spirit: strange buskers in Greenmarket Square, dreadlocked rastamen selling herbs in sackcloth garments, stonehearted gangsters, television executives, foreign football club owners. In this sprawling metropolis with its small-town idiosyncrasies, names and faces have a tendency to appear and reappear with surprising frequency. A character with an alluring act, such as the nun chuck car guard, is bound to have his story circulate during late-night debriefs. "Can you believe the ninja guy outside the bar tonight?"

Lolo’s reputation precedes him. So, it is clear on a late summer evening, while crossing on foot in the east side of the city, exactly who I see pacing up and down the street wielding a Japanese combat weapon. Like so many before me, I introduce myself and ask to see what those wooden cylinders can do.

Master Lolo is more than willing to indulge my request, in fact he’s proud. Friendly and open, sporting his wide smile and throwing back his head with laughter, he strikes me as a man perfectly fitted to his niche, in whatever obscure pocket of diverging cultures it might be. Despite his combative appearance and often furrowed brow, his kindness is immediately apparent. Only later will I learn the remarkable nature of his kindness and humility, given everything that has brought him to this urban corner at the bottom of the world.

On our very first meeting, Lolo makes one thing clear: he is not a car guard, or more precisely, not only a car guard. He occupies a unique position in the local security ecosystem, neither panhandler nor official officer. Technically employed by a local seafood restaurant (an especially fine establishment known as Galjoen) but authorized by the City of Cape Town to patrol the entirety of Harrington Street, Lolo inhabits a gray area. He lacks the authority to make arrests or investigate crimes, yet can act in defense of private property or against threats to life.

The distinction matters to him. In South Africa, "car guard" is a loaded term, representing both a daily headache and an absolute necessity depending on whom you ask. Although businesses and municipalities have attempted to regulate car guarding through high-vis vests, badges, and occasional minimum wage positions, the informal version continues to flourish on street corners throughout the country. South Africa now boasts one of the world's most robust private security industries, employing more than half a million people, a testament to both the nation's economic inequality and its citizens' neurotic, albeit sometimes justified, search for safety.

Thus, Lolo operates in his gray area, excelling, it appears, at a job that rewards both extraordinary combat skills and an amicable personality.

***

I find myself driving into the city one rainy night, seeking out the man behind the nun chucks. A funny thing about people in Lolo's line of work–they're remarkably easy to track down. I’ve barely stepped out of my car when I see him sheltering under an awning, chatting idly to one of the men guarding a nearby construction site. When I signal to him and call out, "Master Lolo!" he politely excuses himself and saunters into the rain to meet me. He wears a thick wool balaclava, so that only his well-worn facial features stand out in the yellow light of the streetlamps.

Shaking his hand, I tell him I’m here to tell his story. I propose my plan to learn about his life, about the dojo and his journey through martial arts.

"Yes," he says simply, "okay.”

Now isn’t the time to get into everything, I explain, but I do have one question before I go. Tell me about the nun chucks?

Without hesitation, he starts off: “I am from Congo.”

“DRC or Republic of?”

DRC. Kinshasa, he answers. The big one. The largest city in Africa, and one of the biggest in the world. It is a place I know little about, a universe so complex and alien to me that I struggle to imagine with any vividity what his early life may have been like.

Though we are standing near to the middle of the street and cars are beginning to swerve more aggressively to pass us, Lolo begins to recount a story of his youth–of how it happened that karate came into his life.

***

Lolo was nineteen years old when he was first attacked. The rainy season had settled over Kinshasa like a suffocating blanket—hot, wet air thick with acrid smoke and carbon dioxide, the kind of oppressive weather that invites hair triggers and flared tempers.

It was late 1997, and six months had passed since Laurent-Désiré Kabila's rebel forces had swept the dictator Mobutu from power. Though civil war had raged in the Congo's east, leaving Kinshasa relatively untouched, the capital now bore the scars of a collapsing state. Kabila struggled to consolidate his grip on power, and the city's infrastructure crumbled beneath the weight of neglect and uncertainty.

In Lolo's neighborhood of Bulambemba, deep within the teeming commune of Ngaba, the breakdown was total. Electricity vanished for weeks at a time, plunging thousands of concrete blocks and iron shanties into sweltering darkness. The city's water sources ran thick with sewage and industrial waste. Currency became worthless overnight—so unreliable that markets reverted to bartering, and possessing foreign money marked one as either powerful or naive.

“It was bad like you cannot imagine,” Lolo says.

In this vacuum of authority, Kinshasa’s royally-named avenues and boulevards belonged to the Kaluna—the all-encompassing street gangs that had terrorized neighborhoods like Ngaba for decades. With youth unemployment soaring above 80 percent, an entire generation of young men faced a stark choice: pick up a rifle, brandish a knife, or watch your family starve. For many in Bulambemba, the decision had already been made.

Lolo had come of age within this constant tension, watching his neighborhood transform into something unrecognizable. He and his older sister had both completed their education, yet they remained trapped at home, scraping together whatever odd jobs they could find to keep their family from sinking deeper into poverty. Their mother still carried the title of teacher, but her salary had vanished months ago along with so many other promises of the old system. Military service might have offered an escape, but Lolo's father, a deeply devout Christian, forbade any involvement with violence, even that sanctioned by the state.

As the hot, muggy days dragged on, the Kaluna grew bolder. They robbed and killed without fear of retribution, their violence escalating with the oppressive weather. Lolo found himself caught between his father's pacifist convictions and the reality of a place gone mad with desperation. How could he hope to defend himself?

The answer came on an afternoon he never forgot, though he can no longer recall what his mother had sent him to buy. Chips, perhaps, or just bread—something simple that their nearly worthless francs could still purchase. He hadn't dared venture as far as Ngaba's main markets, stopping instead at the corner shop when a young man, not much older than himself, blocked his path.

"I'm your big brother," the stranger announced, as if the declaration granted him some authority.

Lolo couldn't tell if the man was Kaluna, but it hardly mattered. In broad daylight, with passersby averting their eyes, the stranger beat him and demanded the coins from his pocket. Lolo stared in bewilderment at his attacker. The money was worthless, barely enough for a bag of chips.

"Why do you beat me?" Lolo asked, genuinely confused by violence over something so trivial.

"Go call your big brother," the man commanded, his voice carrying either mockery or challenge. Perhaps both.

"I have no brother," Lolo replied quietly. "It's fine. You win."

Lolo was weaker then, but he was no fool. This moment wasn’t about money. This was theater, the kind of exaggerated bravado the Kaluna had absorbed from the countless cowboy westerns and kung fu films flooding Kinshasa's makeshift cinemas. The young man was performing power, acting out a role he'd seen on a screen.

In that moment of recognition, something crystallized for Lolo. In his youth, films were everywhere, a constant fascination for him and his friends who would crowd into cinemas to watch foreign wonders beyond imagination. Certain films in particular told tales of great pacifists who defended the weak and became masters of their own fate. Karate first came to Lolo through the fists of Bruce Lee.

***

By 1997, when Lolo found himself cornered at that Bulambemba shop, karate fever had already swept through Kinshasa. The ingredients were all there: a city bursting with restless young men, the Congo's own deep-rooted combat traditions of Libanda and Copeira, and a steady diet of ‘70s Hong Kong action flicks. Mix it all together and karate-mania was inevitable.

The first dojos in the DRC, or Zaire, as it was then known, had actually sprung up in the 1960s thanks to an influx of east Asian immigrants. A particularly mysterious man named Bavua Ntunu André is credited as the father of Congolese karate. In 1968, he founded the Congolese Karate-do Federation and served as its first president, uniting the various independent dojos in the country under one banner and providing a formal structure for competition and training. Later, in the 1980s, he founded a religious movement that might be classified as a kind of ‘linguistic cult’, announcing he’d had a divine revelation that verbs (yes, verbs) held the secret to the ultimate salvation of the black race.

Semantic veneration notwithstanding, karate had found an enthusiastic audience in Kinshasa. In addition to its association with disciplined masculinity and general cool-ness, it offered young men in Lolo’s position a rare third path away from victimhood and violence.

Finding a dojo wasn’t a difficult project in late ‘90s Ngaba. Karate had woven itself so deeply into the commune’s fabric that within days of his decision, Lolo found himself bowing before Master Alain Mbaka, a man whose fierce intensity was tempered by an unexpected gentleness. He’s someone Lolo still can’t mention without a smile.

"I promised my mother," he says simply, "that I would become strong enough to beat this man who beat me."

Lolo's early training was fueled by anger, along with what he now admits was a lust for revenge. The absurdity of his beating had wounded something deeper than pride, something he still struggles to name. And as Kinshasa's brief calm shattered and war erupted once again, Lolo threw himself into his practice with startling intensity. Master Alain became his anchor, offering structure and purpose as the bloodiest war in African history flooded the capital with soldiers, rebels, and refugees.

Meanwhile Lolo trained, worked his muscles, mastered defensive combat and the psychic discipline of precision movement. Though he doesn’t say, perhaps because he was too focused to notice, he must have undergone a dramatic transformation in mind and body. The frightened nineteen-year-old disappeared and in his place, a pacifist warrior grew.

Lolo, by his own account, defied the normal rhythms of martial arts progression. He blazed through the colored belts—white to yellow to orange, green to blue to the successive browns—before earning his black belt in an astonishing handful of years. The byzantine requirements of Shotokan karate, famous for consuming decades, bent to his dedication. Remarkably, before he’d seen thirty, Lolo was a Master in his own right.

Karate engulfed him. He left his parent’s home and moved into the dojo. His friends and his livelihood were centered there. Training, and eventually instruction, were his purpose. He took on students from around the world and competed in the Congo’s Federation circuit. He has not lost a fight since 2003.

That same year delivered an unexpected passport stamp. Selected for a Congolese sports diplomacy scholarship, Lolo found himself deposited in São Paulo's concrete sprawl, where he spent twelve months marinating in judo and jiu-jitsu under South America’s great masters.

It was a time of hazy but deep magic for him. He remembers neither the city's architectural features nor the flavor of his favorite meals, yet Portuguese still tumbles from his tongue quite naturally. What he does recall, with crystalline clarity, is the moment the Brazilian masters awarded him a pair of black wooden nun chucks—polished ebony twins that now hang around his neck like rosary beads for the martially devout.

It was there, in Brazil's humid academies, that he mastered the spinning chains.

***

Standing there on Harrington Street, nearly thirty years later, it’s difficult to imagine a version of Master Lolo at nineteen, untrained and unable to defend himself. The man in front of me, though a bit on the shorter side, stands sturdy as a mahogany, his feet planted firmly on the ground.

Suddenly, I realize, Lolo has answered my question—the nun chucks. His torrent of words, though, continues to match the autumn storm still swallowing us.

His eyes grow animated as he speaks, rain beading on his high-vis. In conjunction with his heavy French-Congolese accent, Lolo makes precise movements with his hands–pointing, slashing, emphasizing a point with a closed fist knocking on an invisible door. His story, vivid enough without gesticulations, is a performance in itself.

“So what happened to the man who beat you?” I ask, interrupting him. We begin to move, finally, under an awning and away from the rain.

“Ah,” he says, beaming. “I returned one year later. When I tell you I beat him, wow.”

It is the only account Lolo ever gives me of a non-defensive fight. He doesn’t divulge the details. Revenge is not a philosophy encouraged by any respectable school of martial arts, and I suspect Lolo knows this. He seems a bit embarrassed at the passions of his younger self. He does, however, use the opportunity to regale me with tale after tale of moments his training has come in handy. He recounts with particular pride an incident where he faced down "seventeen men, right here on this street" (pointing, again, pointing) who had attempted to attack him.

Anachronistically, he jumps from Cape Town to Congo and back, relaying anecdotes ranging from harrowing to humorous. One moment he’s a professional karate master in Kinshasa chasing Kaluna away from innocent women under attack, the next he is a pious family man, an immigrant in a new country protecting his infant daughter from gun-toting home invaders. The stories are impressive acts of heroism. In the latter, he literally kills a man who holds a gun to his head. He uses a code word he's taught his three-year-old daughter to save their lives—a signal that means 'bring me the nun chucks.'

I listen patiently, trying to keep my jaw from hanging slack. I’m riveted, of course. But I realize we are skipping over something important.

***

How had Lolo come to Cape Town? Why had he left the Congo, when it seemed that he was thriving in the dojos of Kinshasa?

“Master Alain,” he answers slowly, his eyes gone soft. “He was a good master. A very good master.”

Lolo shifts on his feet slightly, touching the nun chucks like a talisman.

“In those days,” he says cautiously, “there were many rebels in our city. It was us who showed the rebels how to fight. And the president, he did not think he was gonna make it if he left all those masters in that area.” His face grows dark, a first.

“Now that was the reason he sent the soldiers to come kill us, one by one. That is the reason my master is dying.”

I ask him: “Your master was killed by soldiers?”

“Yes,” he says. “The president, he thinks we are strong. That one day we’re gonna come and take his power down.”

***

Master Lolo is a car guard in South Africa now. He is a husband, a father, a karate instructor. He goes to church on Sundays, where he likes to wear smart three-piece suits with aviator sunglasses. He doesn't like to speak about the DRC, or the things that happened in the months that led up to his clandestine flight. His life, he tells me, is here now. He has only a few old friends in Kinshasa with whom he speaks, including his older sister, who followed in their mother's footsteps as a teacher.

The Congo is another place, another world, where he does not like to dwell. Press him about it and his responses become carefully rehearsed, almost ritualistic. He has his karate origin story polished to a shine, his reverential tales of Master Alain, his devotion to the dojo. But ask about the darker currents—the circumstances that led the government, whether Kabila's forces, his son's, or even city police, to launch their extermination campaign—and the well runs dry. These are the memories he keeps locked away, sealed behind the iron discipline that once carried him through those colored belts with impossible speed. Some things, it seems, are only for masters to know.

***

What he does reveal unfolds like a map drawn by someone trying to forget where the treasure is buried. Even before Master Alain's death, anti-karate sentiment had begun bubbling in Kinshasa's upper echelons. It was Lolo's father, the old Christian who'd spent decades perfecting the art of surviving dictators and their mood swings, who suggested his son might want to consider a change of scenery while the political weather cleared.

So in 2006 or 2007 (time has a way of blurring when you're running from the law), Lolo packed his life into whatever could fit in a suitcase and caught a ride south to Lubumbashi, the DRC's second-largest city. There he found other displaced karate masters from the north, refugees of the martial arts diaspora, still teaching and training but with the volume turned down to a whisper.

He'd planned to hole up for less than a year, just long enough for the storm to pass. But 2008 arrived with unwelcome permanence, and Lolo realized that Ngaba was now forever in his past. Worse yet, the entire DRC was beginning to feel like territory he could no longer safely call home.

Sometime that year, Lolo plotted his escape. There existed, as there always does in places where hope has been bombed out of existence, a kind of underground railroad for the desperate and determined. This particular route required the fewest forged visas, the smallest bribes, and the most reliable airlines willing to look the other way when passengers carried questionable paperwork. The exodus was a geographic lottery: you might wash up in Lusaka, Harare, Maputo, or, if bureaucratic incompetence smiled upon you, Johannesburg.

Lolo, it appears, had drawn the lucky number. After months of cooling his heels in Lubumbashi while document forgers practiced their peculiar art, he climbed aboard a bus that would carry him across 42 hours of Africa's most unforgiving and beautiful terrain. The vehicle groaned through treacherous jungles then sailed across savannahs so stunning they took his breath away.

In Lusaka, he traded his bus seat for the cheapest airplane ticket money could buy to Zimbabwe. From Harare, still riding his trail of falsified papers, he somehow talked his way onto a flight bound for O.R. Tambo International Airport. Shockingly, it had worked. Against all reasonable expectation, Lolo found himself standing on South African soil, still blissfully ignorant of the xenophobic violence that was, at that very moment, sweeping through townships and claiming the lives of his countrymen by the dozens. That, he could contend with later.

He was one of roughly 250,000 Congolese who have followed similar paths to the rainbow nation, each seeking a wage that could actually buy something to eat. What Lolo possessed in abundance was discipline. What he lacked entirely was the ability to speak English.

***

Frantic, panicked and alone in an alien country with an unfamiliar tongue, he began asking strangers at the airport in French, Portuguese, Lingala, even a bit of Japanese he’d picked up from his training, if they knew where he could find a cheap place to sleep tonight. Again, somehow, fortune favored his boldness. A man approached him, a French-speaking West African of some variety, Lolo couldn’t remember what kind. He listened to Lolo’s story and took pity on him.

“Stay with me tonight,” he said. “In the morning, I have a friend who might be able to help you.”

The friend, it turned out, was not of a particularly altruistic disposition. But he had an idea, he said, a shot-in-the-dark notion, that would change Lolo’s life forever (again). His sister lived in Cape Town, he told Lolo, a beautiful city on the far southwest coast where the mountains communed with the sea. She was a colored woman, of mixed racial heritage, who inexplicably spoke some French. Most importantly for Lolo's immediate survival, she possessed an increasingly rare commodity: an exceedingly generous heart, capacious enough to shelter a bewildered stranger until he could navigate this bewildering new world. Her name was Amanda, and she held Lolo’s hand as he crossed the threshold from one life to another.

***

Amanda proved to be Lolo's salvation in ways both profound and mundane. She fed him, sheltered him, and performed the most essential act of kindness imaginable: she taught him English from absolute zero. Picture a grown man learning to navigate the world one vocabulary word at a time ("This is an apple," "That is a car," "You are safe here") while adjusting to a country that had recently been tearing itself apart over the very question of who belonged and who didn't.

Amanda also helped him find his first real work guarding construction sites and warehouses, the kind of overnight shifts that pay just enough to keep a man fed while he figures out his next move. She was, by Lolo’s account, a miracle in human form. Which makes it all the more frustrating that when I attempt to track her down, she has vanished completely.

“Her phone has been stolen by gangsters,” Lolo explains. He no longer remembers her address in Retreat. Amanda has become a ghost, albeit a benevolent one.

After two years, he managed to find his own flat in Goodwood, closer to the city, and even secure passage to South Africa for his longtime girlfriend from Kinshasa. They married, and she began the same bewildering process of cultural translation that her husband had undergone years earlier. Together, they built something resembling a normal life: three children appeared in due course—two girls now eight and six, and a boy of two—transforming Lolo from refugee to husband to father with relentless forward momentum.

The breakthrough that would define his South African existence came around 2015, when a Japanese restaurant owner on Harrington Street issued him a bizarre challenge. The man, a karate enthusiast, had somehow learned of Lolo's martial arts background and proposed a sparring match in his restaurant's basement.

“Did you win?” I ask him, stupidly. I receive another one of Lolo’s signature grins. He reminds me that I was just four years old the last time he lost a fight.

The restaurant owner, seemingly delighted by his own defeat, granted Lolo a choice job: a steady wage and the right to guard cars outside his busy establishment. It was an oddly ceremonial transaction, like being knighted with a pair of nun chucks, but it was the beginning of Lolo's claim to the kingdom of Harrington Street.

The restaurant eventually succumbed to the destruction of COVID-19, but by then Lolo had proven his worth to the neighborhood. Galjoen, the new, upscale seafood bistro down the street, offered him work. The City of Cape Town formalized his authority over the entire block. What had begun as an informal arrangement between a martial arts master and a Japanese businessman had evolved into something approaching legitimacy.

One of the more pleasant surprises of working for Galjoen was discovering that employees received free access to the MyGym at the end of Harrington Street. Lolo approached management with a proposal: might he be allowed to train a few students in their modest corner of the facility? Permission granted, he found himself once again in possession of that most essential element of his identity—a dojo.

The space wasn't much to look at, wedged as it was between treadmills and weight machines, but it served its purpose. More importantly, it reconnected him with Desiré, his former student from Kinshasa who had followed his own circuitous path to Cape Town and was working as an electrician. Their reunion was one of those small miracles that occasionally punctuate the immigrant experience: two men who had shared a practice space in one world discovering each other again in another.

Desiré became his most dedicated student, but others found their way to Lolo's corner of the gym as well. Iska, a chef at Galjoen, wanted to learn self-defense. Several members of the kitchen staff began training with him for exercise, discovering that a karate master who'd survived multiple countries and decades of conflict had strong opinions about commitment and effort.

Lolo, it should be noted, is not a teacher for everyone. His standards are uncompromising, his methods occasionally severe, and his tolerance for half-hearted effort essentially nonexistent.

“He was so hard on us,” laughs Iska. “He’s super, super strict.”

The sessions are grueling affairs: floor work, mat work, twice-weekly weight training with awkward loads and heavy medicine balls. "Sometimes there was a massive language barrier, but you could see the passion," Iska recalls. "It was awesome. He would flip us on that mat like you're a flippin’ salty crack…it was a lot of fun, we walked away with bruises, he wasn't afraid to show us what it was all about."

Eventually, Lolo introduced live self-defense training with real knives, the same approach that would feature in my first visit to his dojo.

"People were absolutely freaked out, because there's a knife flying around in a gym, but it really was a lot of fun," Iska says. "It was a great work out, sometimes two, two and a half hours. It was a blast."

But for those willing to submit to his particular brand of discipline, the results speak for themselves. Desiré, still working his way up through the belts despite his busy life as an electrician, appreciates Lolo's comprehensive approach to training. He focuses on nutrition, conditioning, philosophy, all the small disciplines that separate serious practitioners from weekend warriors.

"The way I learn from Master Lolo is like a mirror," he explains. "I see the right way to do all these things and then I try again over and over until I get it right."

These days, Lolo lives in an apartment just blocks from his work, close enough to walk home for lunch with his family. He celebrates his children's birthdays with the enthusiasm of a man who never expected to have such ordinary, extraordinary pleasures. He trains his students with the same intensity he once brought to his own advancement through the colored belts. He patrols Harrington Street with his nun chucks, a figure both familiar and slightly mysterious to the neighborhood's rotating cast of revelers and regulars.

It is, by most measures, a good life. It was built through a combination of extraordinary skill, persistent kindness from strangers, and the sort of adaptability that comes from having your world collapse more than once.

***

When I return to Harrington Street the following Saturday, the day before Easter, the city is serene and emptied. The din of the construction sites on the south end of the street has ceased, the cars lining the sidewalks gone missing. Only the faint thumping of bass-boosted speakers from a nearby music venue betray the neighborhood’s usual vibrancy.

On this holiday weekend, in the late afternoon with the sun sinking behind the mountain, the neighborhood seems anything but revitalized. There are only a few people milling about. Two security guards in their high-vis vests make conversation against a fence. On the little blue-gated patio of a pizza restaurant, a young couple sip tropical drinks and stare out into the dead afternoon air. I wave at them and walk on to look for Master Lolo.

He emerges from a side street on the far north end of Harrington, signaling me with his nun chucks raised in the air. He is smiling sternly, almost grimacing, as he strides down the middle of the street. Even as he approaches and firmly shakes my hand, his head swivels calmly. He glances seriously to his left and right—watching, observing. He tosses the nun chucks casually around his neck, under the hood of his jumper, where they hang over his high-vis and knock together loudly.

“Yes, yes, let us speak,” he says, pushing past me toward the darkened entrance of Galjoen, “let me first just grab my chair.”

We sit down in the alcove outside the restaurant. Master Lolo is leaning forward in his black plastic chair as I crouch on the concrete stoop below him. It is so quiet that hints of conversations happening blocks away can be heard echoing through the city. Lolo keeps watching, listening, even as we speak. Every now and again someone passes by, presents Lolo with a fist, a head nod, and a respectful acknowledgement: “Master.”

I’ve come to discuss with him more details about his flight from Kinshasa.

“Here, here, let me show you,” he says, pulling out his phone. I watch him scroll deep into his camera roll, and a phenomenon I’ve seen several times occurs again as his features soften and his eyes brighten. In looking for what it was he meant to show me, he’s been distracted by memories. He stops to show me photos of his children, his wife, his family smiling together at church.

“I cannot tell you how happy I was to have a son,” he says, pride radiating in his voice. He leans back in his chair, clutching his nun chucks and shaking his head.

“But here, here is what I want to show you,” he says. “This is my master. This was Master Alain.” It is a screenshot of a Facebook post from 2010, with French text and a grainy photo of a man with a gentle smile.  “Ah brother, strong guy, believe me.”

A weariness comes over Lolo, and I watch as he disappears somewhere else in his mind. He has stopped swiveling his head from one side of the street to the other, his duty forgotten for the moment. I wonder what he was thinking about. I wonder where in Kinshasa, and when, his memories have taken him.

Before I can ask, we are interrupted by a small crowd exiting the seafood restaurant behind us. Kitchen staff, it appears, getting off work early for the holiday.

“Hello Master!” they shout, all of them in their black shirts and grease-stained boots coming up to greet him. Lolo doesn’t miss a beat—he stands up and greets each one by name. 

“These are my students, all my students,” he says to me.

“Master, are you teaching him a lesson?” a young woman teases. Lolo roars with laughter. I am struck once again with the realization of how tied he is to this place, how much of a fixture he has become in the lives of its people. Just as the nun chucks have become part of his body, so has he become part of Harrington Street.

For the moment, we have run out of time. Lolo has to get back to his family, to spend time with his wife and his children the night before Easter. We walk south along the street, toward Lolo’s aging Toyota Etios. A few hundred meters before we get there, a blue sedan comes screeching down the road, passing us at an alarming speed. Lolo glances back at the car disapprovingly.

When we arrive at Lolo’s parking spot, it’s clear something has gone awry. At the pizza restaurant, on the little blue-gated patio, a young woman is sobbing loudly. I recognize her as half the drink-sipping couple I had waved at earlier. The restaurant staff have gathered outside, looking down the street in the direction we came from. One older woman is holding the young lady in her arms, stroking her head, trying to keep her from shaking. The young man is arguing with someone in isiXhosa, gesticulating wildly.

“What happened?” Lolo barks from across the road. He does not approach them. Instead, he goes on with his routine, opening the Toyota’s trunk and fumbling with his nun chucks and his bright blue gi, his competition robes. 

“It was just now, Master,” says one of the restaurant staff. “Came with a knife and took everything.” 

“Who?” shouts Lolo, visibly angry. He points down the road. “It was them?”

“The blue car,” someone says. The young woman continues to cry, burying her face into the older woman’s chest.

It is evident the young couple has just been robbed. Lolo shakes his head and grips his nun chucks. He looks at me with a resigned, sour expression.

“If I had been there,” he says, “this would never happen.” He repeats it twice. Still, though, he does not approach the restaurant. He takes a duffle bag out of the trunk and opens it with so much force the zipper breaks clean off.

“Help me with this now,” he says, and I hold the bag taut while he reattaches the metal piece. I can see the frustration in his face, in his hands as he struggles with the bag. It is clear how personal it is to him when bad things happen on this street. But he keeps calm, glancing back up at the scene of the crime only once. He puts his affairs in order and he closes the trunk. Now he is ready to deal with the aftermath.

Master Lolo crosses the street with the unhurried grace of someone who has done the hard part already. He who has known violence and practiced patience knows very well how to comfort its victims.